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Monthly Archives: October 2011

We’ve been using Request Tracker for tracking requests, incidents and resolutions for years now. A few days ago, we decided to migrate our RT server to a virtual machine so we can retire the old machine. We decided to upgrade to RT 4.0.2 as well.

The upgrade process became complicated because we decided to keep our old data. We managed to upgrade successfully but not without roadblocks.

These are the 2 major issues that we encountered:

1. RT 4.0.2 won’t start because of an issue with the Attachments table, wrong type:

Munin Exchange approved my plugin recently. I submitted it for approval a few months ago that I already forgot about it. The plugin is written in Bash and it graphs temperatures of HDDs attached to a LSI MegaRaid controller.

We’ve been using KVM Virtualization for almost 2 years now and we’re happy with it. But as the number of hypervisors & VM instances increases, so is the complexity of server management which can be frustrating at times.

I realized that we have to find a way to manage it somehow. I’ve been scouring the net for possible solutions. I’ve read about OpenStack & Eucalyptus but the disparity of deploying VM instances against our current deployment is big that migrating one will be difficult.

I have 6 requirements for the target platform:

cost

centralized management

learning curve / ease of deployment

migration constraints (lesser, the better)

performance / high availability

community support

My boss forwarded me this blog about ganeti a few months ago. I was skeptical to try it at first because deployment was debian-centric. We’re using CentOS so that could be a problem. But after reading the documentation + mailing-lists, I realized that migrating to ganeti will be less painful than other solutions (in theory), so I decided to install a test cluster and ran it for a few weeks.

Testing phase is over and ganeti is promising (drbd + live migration rocks!). Our current cluster has 5 nodes but that will surely change as we go into full production 🙂